Last night, I browsed Australian Netflix, and I converged upon the following options:
- Turn off my brain and watch Brett Ratner's
Hercules starring Dwayne Johnson;
- Challenge myself and invest in
Sense8;
- Challenge myself and invest in
House of Cards, at the risk of losing the next two weeks of my life to an incoming addiction;
I started off with
Hercules but shut it off after a few minutes because the introductory voiceover pissed me off. I switched to
Sense8. It is a collaboration between the great J. Michael Straczynsky and the formerly-great Wachowski siblings. The first episode made little sense to me at all, because this is a tremendously original plot with a large number of characters, but by the end of the second episode I was getting it and was more invested.
It continues a theme that JMS built-up in
Babylon 5. JMS understands a trivial point that most other writers of science fiction and fantasy seem completely oblivious too: if telepathy was a real thing, it wouldn't be a minor change to the human condition, it would change everything. The whole social order would be overturned. Scifi writers who create worlds like our own where telepathy exists are bad writers. Sense8 is not such a world; the telepaths are being aggressively hunted by the state, which prevents them from building a community.
It also has something we rarely see on TV, gay characters, black characters, transsexual characters, people who are not super good looking ... there's even an middle eastern person on the show.
That's a rather baseless accusation.
The essence of good dialogue is subtext first and prose afterward. The show isn't on-the-nose, it isn't constantly giving out lines like "I, Ray Velcoro, no longer want to be your informant." stuff you'd hear in GoT and definitely in the Marvel movies.
A good example would be when Velcoro is chugging down the Blue Label, Frank Semyon says "You know, you're supposed to sip that" without saying "you drunk, that's an expensive bottle, dick, wtf are you doing!!"
So no, I disagree, I think it's already heads and shoulders beyond most TV. Season 1 set a pretty high standard because of the way it was framed (which if they repeated it would have different but just as loud complaints) but at its core it's a neo-noir. Neo-noirs are hardboiled, pulpy, obvious at times, quietly tragic at other times.
Imagine if people had the same standards for Game of Thrones or (the overrated) House of Cards as they have for this show?
- why is this new season of HoC not addressing the Columbia Mattress Girl and #blacklivesmatter?
- Not a fan of the new characters, bring back Ned Stark
- I really enjoyed the scenery of Pentos, this Mereen stuff pales in comparison
It's nuts.
There was a good comment about this on BirthMoviesDeath.
The internet spent the better part of last year complaining that True Detective has white male leads, and is as such a mediocre show and Nic Pizzolatto is a bad person for not writing more women. Now, in season 2, we have a woman with sexual hang-ups, a gay man with sexual hang ups, and people are going to complain about that.
Here's a good write-up on Episode 2x02:
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/06/29/true-detective-recap-night-finds-you
whats the beef with Zack Snyder?? only movie he ever made that sucked was sucker punch.
Zack Snyder was once decently regarded because of the competent
Dawn of the Dead remake and the entertaining and nearly intelligent
300. He once made a list of the 50 smartest people in Hollywood.
His reputation began to suffer with
Watchmen. The internet geeks absolutely loathe
Watchmen. It's considered to be worse than the comic book, and people are angry that he got rid of the giant squid. There's been a lot of trash piling on him and it's making him into a punchline.
Sucker Punch is a failed piece of auteur cinema, but it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I appreciate that he created something new even though it sucks, because I respect innovation, and there are individual pieces that work well like when the girls beat up the German zombies, I liked that. The internet regards Sucker Punch as one of the worst movies ever made, which I think is exaggerated. I can name many worse movies and I don't watch that many. I think it's merely a below-average movie.
The Snyder hate reached its apex with
Man of Steel. It's a flawed movie but in ways that are largely distinct and complementary to how the Marvel movies are bad. There's a huge amount of destruction and a lot of people die in the movie... due to Snyder's amazing technical skills, he really successfully conveyed death and catastrophe. The problem is that it's not something people want to see, the fans wanted to see absolute comprehensive victory. Further, the destruction is not addressed in the movie, I don't think he realized it needed to be addressed, but on the bright side, he has unintentionally set up a fantastic sequel for himself, one in which the world turns on Superman due to the destruction in the first movie.
Man of Steel was not his script, Christopher Nolan hired him. Snyder's one known change was to have Superman kill the villain at the end, which really angered a lot of people because they believe that Superman should be perfect and never kill. It's been argued extensively that this is a violation of the character. Snyder's idea was to have Superman be overwhelmed and forced to kill, and in subsequent movies he would regret it and it would form the basis of the no-kill rule.
Snyder does very well with visuals, he understands that
the frame and how scenes are shot is important, he has a few consistent themes such as the tragic nature of heroism and as such eh's willing to challenge his characters, he respects source material which at the time of Watchmen was relatively revolutionary, but unfortunately he is lacking in several areas. He doesn't seem to notice cringe-worthy dialogue, and he doesn't get how scenes flow together. Whereas Snyder would possibly be a top-5 director in the world if movies were 3 minutes long, he drops out of the top-50 for 2 hour movies, since his stories lack connective tissue between scenes. It's as if he just wants to skip to the "good part", and doesn't understand that the good part is typically only good because of how it's been built up to. Nobody would remember the chest-burster scene from
Alien if the entire movie had not led up to it. Snyder either doesn't get or forgets that the build-up is more fundamental than the climax, or maybe he tries to be as stingy as possible on the build-up because he wants to get to the climax and he's so overwhelmed by the excitement of making an awesome scene.
